“IT’S NOT A RACE!” one of them will invariably yell, these boys who make everything a race lately: getting dressed, getting undressed, brushing teeth, running upstairs to yell at Daddy to hurry up in the shower (I may have put them up to that one). The protest over rules that were made long ago always comes from the one lagging in second place of the two, the one no longer wanting those rules to apply. Usually, tears ensue. Life lived in a hurry surely is a tragedy.

I should remember this. You know, since it’s only every day that I engage in my own races against time: adrenaline- and anxiety-fueled marches through my moments, a constant look ahead to what’s next. And in the bigger picture, waiting impatiently for something, always. Currently: issues with a teacher…nighttime toilet training…knowing for certain where we’ll spend the rest of our lives and planning our children’s education accordingly. You know, the little things.

I read back over something I wrote two years ago (!), when we were preparing to move to Sydney, before any of the life we have now was fleshed out before us. I wrote about how The Kid is a story told in more than one sitting, and aren’t all of us? Isn’t life? Yet I constantly try to distill it into manageable doses where the ending is already known, if not accomplished outright.

Last week, on Father’s Day, I benevolently repaid The Husband for my own break on Mother’s Day and took the boys to a movie. Christopher Robin was playing at the local cinema and it was a rainy afternoon, which meant everyone in the general area was there, every seat taken. Considering it was a live-action film with several Serious Adult Conversations, the boys made it through a respectable amount, but when TK announced he had to go to the toilet we stumbled over everyone in our path and headed home. Later, of course, I went to my favourite movie spoiler website because that is how I roll. I wanted to see the ending I’d missed, and I read the quote from the last moments of the film, when Pooh asks Christopher Robin what day it is. “Today,” he replies, and Pooh says, “My favourite day.”

I wish I could be more like a stuffed bear. I wish I could enjoy each moment for what it is, and not out of guilt or obligation but because of the beauty inherent in each one–because of the gift they all are. Instead, rather than resting in these gifts, I feel more like Little Brother as he learns his way around the monkey bars, which for right now looks like him being suspended uneasily in the air, yelling “HELP!” right before I come to grab him.

For his part, TK doesn’t like the suspension any more than I do. “I used to be American but now I’m Australian,” he often announces lately, his dividing lines always so black-and-white and ever-present, his way of making sense of the world riding on clear divisions and Befores and Afters. I know it’s not that clear, no matter how often I too wish it was–that who and where we are is more of a complicated mixture than a linear path. But even his demand for clarity is its own gift in all its moments, like when he was in Scripture class and they were saying the Lord’s Prayer. “But what does that mean?” he asked the teacher, and when she recounted it to me at church this week, she said she realised what a great question it was–how it made her slow down and really think about the words anew.

This suspension with which I am so uncomfortable, this constant between-ness–between countries, and people, and moments–I suspect I would enjoy it more if I’d remember the simple truth that I am held. Held by a grace that doesn’t swoop in at the last moment like I do for LB on the monkey bars, but that is always there, enveloping me though I can’t feel it, can’t always see it either. This morning the boys and I walked to the car and LB gripped my hand in that awkward way kids do, fingers splayed all over it, and I thought it to myself, that I should enjoy this moment. That he won’t always want to hold my hand. Drops of guilt and fear mixed in with the attempt at gratitude. He’ll probably even drop it any second now, I thought, preparing for what I thought was next. Instead, he didn’t. We walked across the front yard, to the car, and he climbed inside, somehow holding me in his grip the entire time.